The Tales We Tell Ourselves

From all indications, President Bush and his secretary of education,
Rod Paige, enjoy the exalted positions they occupy. But no matter how
enthusiastically they pound the bully educational pulpit before them,
the story they are telling the American people is incomplete. A good
case can be made, indeed, that the broader conservative school agenda
on which they labor will wind up wrecked on the rocks and shoals of
substantive problems their fervor allows them to ignore.

That’s a fair conclusion to draw from our work over the last
10 years with some 200 school superintendents, urban, suburban, and
rural, from across the United States. During that time, we helped lead
the Danforth Foundation’s Forum for the American School
Superintendent as it applied the latest thinking about leadership and
organizational dynamics to the challenges facing local school
leaders.

Two lessons stand out from that decade-long experience. First,
it’s not wise to impose simple solutions on complex problems that
present themselves in different ways in diverse communities. The
top-down, one-size-fits-all approach to school reform that’s
embedded in the federal No Child Left Behind Act is just the latest
evidence that H.L. Mencken was right when he said, "Every complex
problem has a solution that is simple, direct, plausible, and wrong."
The "No Child" law and other "common sense" approaches to school reform
are just such solutions.

Let’s be clear. The great benefit of the No Child Left Behind
Act is that it brought accountability to the top of the nation’s
education agenda. Its great drawback was to push to the sidelines
virtually everything else. Worried about student learning?
Accountability is our response. Concerned about teacher adequacy?
Annual testing of every child is our ace in the hole. What about
educational equity? Accountability, assessment, and adequate annual
progress provide both answer and alliteration. The conviction that an
assessment system of this sort, applied in this way, will improve
learning in America is so egregiously sophomoric that it gives
accountability a bad name.

Accountability and standards are so fundamental that they should be
considered a commonplace of school improvement, according to the
Danforth Forum’s 200 superintendents. But there are other
"commonplaces" as well. They can be thought of as forming a jigsaw
puzzle of a dynamic triangle or arrowhead pointing toward excellence
and equity. Surprisingly, resources played no role in the
superintendents’ discussion about commonplaces. Oh, sure, these
leaders complained about money. Who doesn’t? But finances never
made the cut of commonplaces. Instead, the jigsaw puzzle they put
together consists of a complex interplay of leadership, governance,
standards and assessment, race and class, school principals, out-
of-school support for learning, and community engagement.

When President Bush and Secretary Paige praise the No Child Left
Behind Act, they celebrate yesterday’s agenda, a plausible but
oversimplified technical response to a complicated array of educational
challenges. The Danforth superintendents, by contrast, developed
tomorrow’s approach, what the physician and leadership scholar
Ron Heifetz, of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of
Government, would immediately recognize as an adaptive response
encouraging the entire community to "own" the problem, work on the
solution, and take up the hard work required to make a difference. Like
Mencken, Dr. Heifetz understands a first principle: There are no easy
answers.

The second lesson the superintendents helped us learn is equally
powerful. In every institution—government, corporation,
university, or school—all of us tell ourselves stories about our
organization. Then we work at becoming what the story line
requires.

Gareth Morgan, a management expert at Toronto’s York
University, says most of us carry images around in our heads about the
nature of organizations and institutions. Images and metaphorsin
powerful but incomplete wayshelp us understand what’s going on
organizationally. The images, in a sense, also become self-fulfilling
prophecies. We work at becoming what we think we are.

What are these images? There are many, according to Mr. Morgan,
several familiar to most of us. Among them is the organization as
machine. This mechanistic metaphor emphasizes that parts are
replaceable and need to be properly aligned. Then, there’s the
organization as a system of government, an image emphasizing
politics, relationships, and conflict around power. Theorists like Ron
Heifetz and Peter Senge, of "Fifth Discipline" fame, are likely to
think of adaptation as crucial to organizational survival.
They’re probably attracted to images of the organization as an
organism, brain, or culture, each a slightly
different conception emphasizing growth and adaptation (organism),
intelligence and learning (brain), or values, norms, beliefs, and
rituals (culture).

It’s not wise to impose simple solutions on
complex problems that present themselves in different ways in diverse
communities.

Metaphors like these resonate powerfully with much of the dialogue
about schools today. There’s little doubt, for example, that the
organizational image held by government and business leaders supporting
the No Child Left Behind law is of the school as a machine. Whenever
you find machine images of schools, you come across detailed mandates
and rules. Regulations govern operations and curricula. Hierarchical
reporting is the norm. And the emphasis always is on alignment,
control, accountability, and uniformity of results. Sound familiar?
It’s the formula embedded in the latest federal legislation.

What about the metaphor of schools as living organisms? That’s
an image supported by many. Here, schools and their environments are
viewed as mutually dependent and interactive. Appointed and elected
district leaders consider themselves to be responsible for protecting
and developing the institution in their care. The district will almost
always seek alignment not in a top-down fashion but among the many
interrelated subsystems in the community, including interests outside
the school. Missouri’s Caring Communities school initiative,
which coordinates social services around schools, embodies the organism
metaphor.

Let’s look at a more hard-nosed image. Salted away in the
warrens and back rooms of central offices and union headquarters
everywhere we find good, old-fashioned realists. These steely- eyed men
and women insist that schools are political entities in which power
determines who winds up on top. Competing interests in the schools and
community dominate decisionmaking, frequently around contracts,
patronage, and employment. Interest groups, disputes, and power
relationships are continuously under consideration and assessment.
Leadership here is a zero-sum game because winners and losers have to
be balanced if community equilibrium is to be maintained. Wherever you
see a strike, difficult labor-management relations, or contentious and
lengthy school board meetings, assume that political metaphors dominate
district thinking, and you’re probably on the right track.

There is even an image of the organization as an instrument of
domination. Raw power is displayed at its most formidable in this
metaphor. Dominance of the weak by the strong is taken for granted. And
the advantage of certain groups is accepted as the natural order of
things. That might describe an Asian sweatshop, you say, but it’s
hard to imagine in education. Explain, then, the persistence of Jim
Crow schools for three- quarters of a century, the monotonous whiteness
of enrollment in most Advanced Placement classes, and the disinterest
of many school leaders in demonstrable inequalities in achievement.

What does all this have to do with the "No Child" law? It has to do
with the metaphors the nation embraces around its schools.

When historians of the future look back at the first
decade of the 21st century, what will they conclude about the stories
we told ourselves?

When historians of the future look back at the first decade of the
21st century, what will they conclude about the stories we told
ourselves? That we sold ourselves a tale promising educational nirvana
with a top-down approach to the needs of 48 million students in more
than 100,000 schools? That we worked at making the schools our children
attended into machines, all stamping out identical parts? That we
bought into the promise of an easy, technical fix that was simple,
direct, plausible—and wrong?

Or will they conclude that rose gardens were not among the promises
our story contained? That we were realists and didn’t kid
ourselves? That we respected the rich diversity of the schools and
students in the United States and the elaborate dynamics involved with
closing the achievement gap? That we faced up to the complex nature of
the challenges before us, while insisting on an adaptive response that
was difficult, subtle, equally plausible—and in the end
correct?

James Harvey is a senior fellow at the Center on Reinventing Public
Education at the University of Washington, in Seattle, and Robert H.
Koff is the director of the Center for Advanced Learning at Washington
University, in St. Louis. They are the co-authors of The
Superintendent’s Fieldbook (Corwin Press, 2004), which grew
out of their work with the Danforth Forum, described in this essay.

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